How Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Plans to Tackle Video

Yahoo took the unprecedented step of broadcasting live video of its second-quarter earnings call. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that CEO Marissa Mayer talked up video as a top priority for the Internet company.

Mayer, amid questions about the topic during the webcast, pledged to make video a “primary area of investment over the next year”–and gave some insight into how she plans to do that.

Yahoo has been trying to figure out how to boost its video offerings and thus increase the amount of space it has to sell video ads, which often are more lucrative than typical graphical ads. It tried–but failed–to buy video sites Dailymotion and Hulu earlier this year.

So what will Mayer do now?

Mayer said the company may do more deals like its licensing of 38 years’ worth of “Saturday Night Live” content, which will be available on Yahoo starting this fall.

“We think there’s room for lots of players and video really comes down to the question of the content,” she said.

In addition, she said the company would continue to invest money in funding original content for Yahoo Screen, its video portal. The romance video series “Burning Love” is one such example.

But as a technology company, Mayer is thinking about becoming a “platform” for video content rather than focusing on creating it. (Hence the interest in Dailymotion, which Yahoo never confirmed.) Mayer said she believes Yahoo “can have a fair amount” of video that is generated by individual users, similar to the model popularized by Google’ YouTube.

She noted that Yahoo’s photo site Flickr allows people to upload three-minute videos, and that Yahoo’s newly acquired Tumblr also has plenty of such video.

That’s why YouTube in recent years has focused on funding video creators so they can make higher-quality videos than those being uploaded to the site. Most videos on YouTube generate just $1 to $2 in advertising per thousand views, according to some advertisers.

Mayer said Yahoo also will continue to enter into content partnerships like those it has with Hulu, ABC News and CNBC, in which Yahoo hosts videos made or distributed by those companies and takes a cut from the sale of video ads tied to the content.

A “minority of the content would be our own original programming, a majority will be through partnerships,” Mayer said during the earnings webcast.